Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural design approach to define relationships between service producers and consumers. In a service oriented architecture environment, independent services are accessible to different consumers without requiring knowledge of the underlying platform implementations of the available services. Service oriented architecture introduced a new emerging computing standard, which allows the software components or systems to be exposed and consumed as loosely-coupled services. This technology gives the potential to extend the capability and primary functions of a conventional email system. In particular, service oriented architecture technology provides an ability to extend the functionality of a conventional email client.
Conventional email systems are primarily used for human-to-human communications. Conventional email systems do not support human-to-computer service applications. In applications that imitate human-to-computer service applications, email systems typically interface with a custom application programming interface (API) that has limited functionality tied to a particular service offering. While existing standards such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) provide an infrastructure foundation for human-to-computer communications, conventional email systems do not take advantage of these and other standards to facilitate human-to-computer software services.